A new VR gaming headset is expected some time later this year from Sony. While some speculations have called it the Sony PS5 VR, no concrete information has come our way about its branding so far. What has, however, is a new set of information that sheds light on the kind of quality that the purported Sony PS5 VR may bring with itself. At its heart, the next generation VR gaming experience from Sony PlayStation appears to bring 4K visuals with foveated rendering, eye tracking, a haptic feedback motor and USB-C tethering to a PS5 console for easy setup and play.
According to a report by Upload VR, the new generation Sony PS5 VR will apparently feature a total visual area resolution of 4000 x 2040 pixels, or 2000 x 2040 pixels per eye. While this itself is seemingly lesser in terms of numbers in comparison to the HP Reverb G2 VR headset, Sony will apparently have a few tricks up its sleeve to up the game. This is speculated to include Tobii eye tracking, which will make use of foveated rendering on the headset to supersample sections of graphics – thus improving the overall resolution and imagery.
In simpler terms, foveated rendering ensures that it recognises the direction that your eyeballs are pointing at, and renders the area of focus in sharper, oversampled details that add to the overall quality. This is achieved by reducing the quality of visuals rendered in areas of peripheral vision, hence saving on processing time and also creating a more natural and intuitive visual experience.
The Sony PS5 VR will apparently club this with other features such as haptic feedback on its new generation controllers, which will essentially take cues from the new DualSense controllers bundled with the new PS5. The haptic feedback quality is excellent on it, and will apparently come to the VR headset as well. Sony may also combine this with eye tracking to make directional gameplay even more engaging on the PS5 VR.
The report further states that one major area that would be improved is setup – Sony will apparently need users to only plug in the PS5 VR to the PS5 console once, and that’s job done. There will no longer be the need to setup and pair an additional camera unit, as the PS5 VR may come integrated with cameras on its body itself. The overall feature set therefore looks set to offer a fairly comprehensive set of feature upgrades over the previous PSVR, and it’ll be interesting if Sony manages to make the experience truly intuitive enough to appeal to wider audiences.
